Ten little-known facts about Apple Stores

Stephen Hutcheon
July 23, 2015
The Age

While David Jones and the ABC have announced plans to scale back and phase out their shop-front presence, not all retailers are retreating from the bricks-and-mortar experience.
Six years after opening its first store in Australia, Apple will open its 22nd domestic outlet on Saturday in the southern Sydney suburb of Miranda. The company now has a network of more than 450 stores in 16 countries.
Apple has never closed a retail store since it opened its first one at the Tyson’s Corner shopping centre just outside Washington, DC, in 2001.
Here are 10 facts about Apple’s booming retail business:
1. Apple Stores have consistently rated among the world’s most profitable retail outlets, when measured by sales per foot of retail space. In the US, Apple Stores generated $US4798.82 in sales per square foot on an annualised basis at the end of 2014, according to data provided by retail consultancy eMarketer. The returns eclipsed those recorded by established retailers such as Tiffany, Costco, Lululemon and Coach.
2. In 2014, Apple chief executive Tim Cook said Apple Stores received more than 1 million visitors per day worldwide.
3. In its 2014 annual report, Apple revealed that its average revenue per store was $US50.6 million a year.
4. The report also showed that about 46,200 of the total full-time equivalent employees worked in the retail segment. That’s about half of Apple’s entire full-time equivalent workforce.
5. Before Apple opened its first store, it built a secret prototype store to test the concept.
6. In the process of designing the early stores, the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs made his executives spend 30 minutes deciding what hue of grey to paint the employee toilets, according to his ad partner Lee Clow.
7. The Apple Store display benches are made from maple wood. They are modelled on the worktables found at Apple’s secretive industrial-design studio at its headquarters in Cupertino where all Apple’s products begin life.
8. The stone used on the flooring comes from a family-owned quarry, Il Casone, in Firenzuola outside Florence in Italy. Jobs “discovered” the grey-blue Pietra Serena sandstone during a trip to Italy in 1985. Former Apple Store boss Ron Johnson said Apple uses only 3 per cent of what comes out of the quarry, “because it has to have the right shading and veining and purity”.
9. The flagship Sydney store features 15-metre high, German-made glass slabs which were, at the time they were installed in 2008, the largest plates of laminated glass in the world.
10. The decorative stainless steel used in the stores is made by a Japanese supplier. The material has been blasted with small beads to achieve the desired hue and effect specified by Apple.
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